As used herein, “video game” refers to any electronic game that involves human interaction with a user interface to generate visual and/or auditory feedback on a gaming device. The gaming device may be a general purpose computing device (computer, tablet, smartphone, etc.) that is programmed to execute the video game, or a special-purpose gaming machine or console.
Over the years a broad spectrum of games has been developed which span a plethora of different genres, such as role playing games, puzzle games, simulation games, first-person shooters, and so forth. In addition, different games allow for different levels of interactions between the various human participants. A single-player game is designed to elicit input from only one player throughout the course of the gaming session. Thus, the other characters or participants that the player encounters throughout the game consist solely of non-player characters (NPCs) controlled by one or more computer systems. By sharp contrast, in a multiplayer game, the player is confronted with characters or situations controlled by human participants in addition to or instead of NPCs. However, the format and degree of interaction between the human participants can vary greatly depending on the design of the particular game being played.
Competitive games are games that pit players against one another, often referred to as “Player vs. Player” or “PvP” games. One example of PvP games include first person shooters, such as Overwatch developed by Blizzard Entertainment, where teams consisting of six players fight each other in various match formats to eliminate characters on the opposing team, capture objectives, or escort payloads to various locations on the map. Another example of a PvP game are Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs), which typically involve players controlling “champion” characters displayed using third-person perspective which battle in teams against competing players for kills, gold, objectives, items, and so forth. In some cases, such as with Heroes of the Storm developed by Blizzard Entertainment, the champion characters are assisted by computer controlled NPCs which the player characters seek to aid in overcoming the defenses of the opposing team. However, competitive games can also sometimes take the form of “Player vs. Environment” or “PvE” games where instead of direct competition with other players, the competition comes in the form of which player performs the best at the objectives of the game. For example, one game may have a player character that is beset by waves of NPCs which increase in difficulty over time, thus the competitive aspect is how far a player can reach before becoming overwhelmed. As another example, in Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), guilds of players often compete to be the first guild in the world or on their server to defeat new bosses introduced into the game. In some competitive gaming circles, there is even the phenomenon of “speed running”, which is the practice of taking a normally non-competitive game and holding contests to determine which player can beat the game in the shortest amount of time.
Players enjoy games for many different reasons, some enjoy the storyline, and others enjoy the feeling of accomplishment obtained from defeating difficult challenges. However, another major factor that motivates players (especially in competitive games) is glory. Namely, the ability for a player to show off their skills and prove that they are a one man (or woman) apocalypse. Some games foster this aspect of player motivation by providing achievements which can be completed to reward cosmetic items allow one player to show their accomplishment to other players. Other games provide rankings and/or leader boards that allow players to compete to be displayed in association with a prominent icon, title, or position. However, the aforementioned mechanisms are passive, they allow a player to show off what they have accomplished, but does not allow the player to directly show off the gameplay that others would find impressive.
As a result of the lack of mechanisms within the game to display their skill, players often resort to third-party programs that allow their gameplay to be recorded or streamed for display to others. For example, popular programs such as Fraps or Open Broadcast Software (OBS) are often used by players to record their gameplay for upload or streaming to sites which publish the recorded content, such as YouTube or Twitch TV. However, while such programs allow players to display their skills to others, third-party programs also have inherent limitations. First and foremost, the third-party programs often require a significant amount of time to set up and must be explicitly activated each time the player begins a play session. Thus, if the program is not explicitly activated, any impressive plays made during the play session are lost. Furthermore, these programs tend to record until explicitly turned off, as a result, the space required to store the recorded gameplay can become quite large if the gameplay continues for hours on end. Streaming ameliorates this issue a bit in some cases by not retaining the streamed content after display to the viewers, but any particularly impressive plays are then lost thereafter if not recorded using a separate program. Furthermore, these programs capture the entirety of the gameplay of a given session. As a result, there may be long periods of times where nothing impressive happens within the game which can be tedious to watch. To combat this issue, many players who upload their recorded videos for others to watch significantly edit their videos to leave only the periods of most impressive gameplay, which is not possible to do manually in real time.
In the past there have been a few attempts to record gameplay using an in-game system to try to capture various impressive plays and display those plays to others participating in the game and/or to spectators of the game. For example, if the game is configured such that players must reach a threshold number of team kills to win, the game client may display the period of gameplay around the last kill that occurred during the game since this kill directly caused the victory for the player's team. However, there is no guarantee that the last kill is necessarily the most impressive play that was performed over the course of the game.
For instance, there may have been a situation earlier in the game where one player managed to survive and emerged victorious even while being severely outnumbered. Capturing only the last kill would not make it possible to display such cases which would be considered fart more impressive than a single kill that ended the game. As another example of a previous technique, the play that was most impressive over the course of the game (referred to herein as the “play of the game”) has been determined by identifying the portion of gameplay where a player or team has received the highest number of kills within a set window of time. However, depending on the game, player skill is not measured solely by kills. Many games split characters into different roles, such as characters who are focused on damage, support, tanking, defense, and so forth, many of which are not always capable of generating a large number of kills, but nonetheless can perform plays gamers would consider impressive. For instance, a support character may be able to heal teammates, render those teammates temporarily invulnerable, resurrecting their teammates, or any other abilities that work to ensure heroes never die (without a fight). Many would consider a play where a support character saves their team to be just as or even more impressive than ranking up a large kill streak. However, such plays cannot be represented using a scoring metric for plays that is based solely on kills.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.